Laser Wolf

Rooftop, Smoke, and the Spice Logic of the Israeli Grill

There is a particular sensory sequence to arriving at Laser Wolf that sets the meal's terms before you've touched the menu. The elevator opens onto the Hoxton Hotel's rooftop at 97 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the Manhattan skyline spreads across the western horizon, string lights overhead, and the smell of char and spiced meat rising from the grill. This is not incidental atmosphere. It is the correct context for understanding what Israeli skewer-house cooking is actually doing.

The mangal tradition, wood or charcoal grilling as the structural center of a meal, carries a spice logic that differs from what most American diners associate with barbecue. Baharat, a blend of black pepper, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, and clove, provides depth without heat. Sumac brings a dry, tart acidity that brightens rather than sweetens. Za'atar functions as both herb and seasoning, its dried thyme and sesame notes working particularly well against the bitterness that high-heat grilling introduces. These are the aromatics that a well-executed skewer house deploys not as garnish but as architecture, and understanding that is the difference between reading a menu as a list of proteins and reading it as a coherent argument.

Salatim First: Why the Spreads Are the Point

Israeli dining culture moves in a direction that runs counter to Western tasting logic. Where European fine dining tends to build from restrained to rich, the Israeli table front-loads abundance. Salatim, the collective term for the spread of small vegetable preparations, dips, and pickled things that open a meal, arrive in quantity, and the quality of a kitchen's salatim tells you most of what you need to know about its sourcing discipline and palate.

At Laser Wolf, the salatim section includes preparations like baba ghanoush, mushrooms with Swiss chard and sour cherry, pickles, and gigante beans with harissa. That last combination is worth pausing on: gigante beans have a starchy, almost buttery interior that absorbs harissa's charred-pepper heat without losing texture, and the result reads as both satisfying and calibrated. The sour cherry addition to the mushroom dish speaks to the Levantine instinct for fruit-acid contrast, a technique with roots in Persian and Ottoman cooking that has become central to modern Israeli restaurant vocabulary.

This front-loaded structure also has a practical effect on pacing. By the time skewers arrive, the table has already established a flavor reference point, and the grilled proteins read against the backdrop of those earlier preparations rather than in isolation. Lamb kofta, for instance, arrives with its baharat-heavy seasoning already contextualized by whatever sumac or preserved lemon appeared in the salatim spread. It is a structurally intelligent way to eat, and it is one reason the Israeli casual-dining format has translated more successfully to American cities than many other regional traditions.

Where Laser Wolf Sits in New York's Israeli Dining Tier

New York's Israeli and broader Middle Eastern dining has expanded considerably over the past decade, moving from falafel-and-hummus casual into a more differentiated tier that includes serious wine programs, refined technique, and the kind of booking friction that signals genuine demand. Laser Wolf occupies a specific position in that tier: it is casual by format and price, priced at the $$$ range, but it draws enough reservation pressure that access requires planning. Its Opinionated About Dining Casual North America ranking has shifted across years, appearing at #233 in 2024 and #208 in 2025, which tracks a property still finding its footing in a competitive list but consistently present, and it holds a Michelin Plate as of 2024.

The comparison that clarifies the restaurant's positioning is not with New York's formal dining tier, the $$$$-bracket counters like Masa, the tasting-menu rooms like Atomix, Eleven Madison Park, Per Se, or Le Bernardin, but rather with the cohort of chef-driven casual restaurants that treat a specific regional tradition as a serious subject. The closer peer nationally might be Bavel in Los Angeles, which operates in the same Israeli and broader Levantine register with similarly structured booking demand. In London, Honey and Co demonstrates how the same tradition reads in a different city context, with less spectacle and more intimacy. The restaurant's rooftop format and Williamsburg address push it toward the more theatrical end of that spectrum.

Chef Michael Solomonov, who co-owns the restaurant with Steve Cook, carries Philadelphia's Zahav on his credential record, a restaurant that played a central role in establishing Israeli cooking as a serious category in American fine dining. That lineage matters here not as biography but as a signal of where the flavor vocabulary originates and how it has been refined across multiple properties before arriving in Brooklyn.

The Rooftop as Context, Not Decoration

American rooftop dining has a credibility problem. Too many hotel rooftops function as cocktail venues with food as an afterthought, where the view is the only argument for the price and the kitchen is an ancillary operation. The restaurant operates against that pattern. The open kitchen is structural to the experience, the grill is the center of the menu rather than its edge, and the cooking is what sustains the visit once the sunset has done its work.

That said, timing matters. The views track the light, and evening reservations, particularly in the earlier part of the dinner window, deliver the full sequence of pre-dusk Manhattan framing that the rooftop's position on Wythe Avenue makes possible. Dinner runs Monday through Sunday, 5 to 10 pm, which provides options across the week. The meal closes with brown sugar soft-serve, a clean, low-key ending that avoids the dessert-as-finale theatrics common to more formal rooms, and functions more like the fruit or tea that closes a Middle Eastern meal than a Western dessert course.

Planning Your Visit

The restaurant is located on the rooftop of the Hoxton Hotel at 97 Wythe Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Dinner runs nightly from 5 to 10 pm. The price range sits at the $$$ level, positioning it as an accessible evening out relative to the city's formal dining tier. Booking is competitive; reservations should be secured in advance.